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MILLSTONE OR

MILESTONE?
WHAT RICH COUNTRIES MUST DO IN
PARIS TO MAKE AID WORK FOR POOR
PEOPLE

On March 2nd, the worlds richest countries will meet in Paris to agree the actions needed to
make aid work for one billion people living in poverty. The aid donors currently preside over a
system that fails the poor. Less than half of aid is spent in the poorest countries. This money
is further devalued by donor red tape, duplication, conflicting objectives, intrusive conditions
and tying to overpriced goods and services. At a time when aid is increasing, it is critical that
this money makes an effective contribution to the fight against poverty. Without concrete
steps in Paris to make aid accountable and efficient, progress towards the Millennium
Development Goals will be jeopardised. The choice facing development ministers at the
OECD High Level Forum is simple: 2005 can either be a milestone in making aid work for the
people it is supposed to help, or a millstone.
MILLSTONE OR MILESTONE?
WHAT RICH COUNTRIES MUST DO IN PARIS TO
MAKE AID WORK FOR POOR PEOPLE

Executive Summary
At the start of March, international development ministers from the worlds richest
countries will gather round the table in Paris to identify the actions needed to make
aid work for one billion people living in extreme poverty. Two years ago in Rome,
these same countries made a series of commitments to reform the aid system, and
transform it into an effective instrument of change. But instead of celebrating
progress, they will be confronted by the results of two years of inaction. This is a
sorry tale of muddle and hypocrisy, dithering and stalling, with the worlds poor cast
unwittingly in the role of fall guy. For example:

Less than half of aid gets spent in the poorest countries, and only 10% gets
spent on basic services that are critical to achieving the Millennium
Development Goals
40% of aid continues to be tied to overpriced goods and services from the
donors own countries
80 official agencies are responsible for 35,000 aid transactions a year that are
imposing a massive administrative burden on some of the poorest countries.
Aid conditions continue to impose donor blueprints, such as trade
liberalisation and privatisation of essential services, with often devastating
results for poor people

The lack of progress since Rome raises fundamental questions about the
commitment of rich countries to the 2015 Millennium Development Goals. Without aid
reform, these goals will not be met, and the ambitions of major donor countries to use
2005 as a turning point in international development will be jeopardised. Yet the
script can read differently. In Paris, the donor agencies have the opportunity to make
the OECD-DAC High Level Forum a milestone in international efforts to eradicate
poverty, rather than a millstone for the worlds poor. To make aid an instrument of
deep and lasting change, donors must agree to do some simple things to improve its
efficiency and accountability.

First and foremost, they need to spend aid where its needed, on poverty reduction
rather than channel it to their own consultancy and infrastructure industries, and
geopolitical allies. Cutting the red tape and intrusive conditions that accompany aid,
using countries own systems and procedures, delivering whats promised on time,
and practising what is preached about transparency would together transform the
impact of aid on poverty. The need for these changes is well understood. So far, it is
political commitment rather than analysis that has been in short supply.

To deliver these changes, ActionAid and Oxfam are urging the donors agencies
gathered in Paris to act on the following three key recommendations:

1. Make Aid accountable


Adopt ambitious targets for improving aid quality
Hold an annual international meeting of donors and recipients to review
these targets
Create an independent UN commission on aid effectiveness
2. Make Aid Effective
Untie all aid, including food aid and technical assistance
Use countries own systems and systems to build capacity
End intrusive policy conditions
3. Reform the Aid Architecture
Allocate aid according to poverty reduction criteria
Cut transaction costs by harmonising procedures
Identify structural reforms to aid

The public response around the world to the Indian Ocean Tsunami demonstrated
that people care, and believe aid can make a positive difference to poor countries
development prospects. However, the Tsunami response has also cast a spotlight on
the effectiveness of that aid, and raised critical questions about whether it is
benefiting poor people on the ground. At Paris and through 2005, this will be the test
against which rich countries development commitments are measured, not least by
poor people themselves. If the international development goals are going to become
a reality, donor half measures and excuses need to stop, and action needs to begin.
Introduction
2005 represents an unprecedented opportunity for the international community to
deliver decisive progress towards poverty eradication. As the first Millennium
Development Goal (MDG) falls due, a series of decision-making events, from the G8
and MDG summits to the WTO Ministerial, have the potential to galvanise rich and
poor countries into reaching long overdue agreement on the actions needed to lift
one billion people out of extreme poverty. Africas development prospects are high on
the agenda of several G8 countries. A growing number of democratically elected
poor country governments are asserting control of their development plans. Civil
society around the world is mobilising to put pressure on their leaders to translate
promises into tangible results. The MDGs provide an internationally agreed
framework for assessing progress, and focusing on outcomes.

Aid has a critical role to play in contributing to achieving these goals, most of which
are seriously off-track. Good governance, trade justice and debt relief are all
essential to progress, but none of these can stand alone. Without aid, the poorest
countries will not have adequate resources to invest in education, healthcare and
water, confront the HIV-AIDS pandemic, and tackle hunger. After more than a
decade of declining aid flows, donor commitments are finally set to rise significantly.
This is happening on the back of pledges made at the UN summit on Financing for
Development, held in 2002, where an emerging consensus recognised that aid does
matter for development.

These aid increases present an exceptional opportunity to get the MDGs back on
track. But they also pose an exceptional challenge to the donor agencies that provide
that aid. Put simply, the aid system is not geared to deliver on the poverty reduction
goals agreed in 2000. Instead, poor countries are confronted by an aid system that
was originally devised to meet the reconstruction needs of post-war Europe. During
the Cold War, this system mutated into a confusing muddle of official agencies, each
with their own projects and programmes, that are driven by competing geopolitical,
commercial and development objectives.

This legacy persists today. Aid is allocated inconsistently across sectors and
countries, with much of it spent in the donor countries on overpriced and
inappropriate goods and services. Donor demands for demonstrable results and
accountability have driven the creation of parallel systems for planning, implementing
and reporting of projects and programmes. Byzantine donor procedures and
conditions have distorted incentives and systems in aid dependent countries, and
undermined local capacity, hindering with one hand where they have helped with the
other.

The Aid Effectiveness agenda, which was pulled together by the OECD Donor
Assistance Committee in Rome in 2003, is designed to respond to these major
challenges. Yet so far it has been treated largely as a technical process, best dealt
with behind closed doors by civil servants, and insulated from the calendar of
international meetings that attract media and political attention. This is a mistake on
two counts.

First, without an aid system that is explicitly geared to supporting poverty reduction
rather than treating it as one objective among many the wider MDG agenda cannot
succeed. Therefore aid effectiveness has to be addressed as part and parcel of
international efforts to achieve the MDGs, and not as an adjunct dealt with by the
donors own club. The MDG summit in September will be a key forum for integrating
aid effectiveness into this bigger development agenda.
Second, progress will inevitably be piecemeal without robust accountability
mechanisms, which hold donors as well as recipients to account for what they do and
dont deliver. So far, mutual accountability has been little more than a donor mantra,
with neither the public information nor the open forums needed both at national and
international level to hold individual actors up to scrutiny and constructive criticism.
As a first step, the forthcoming Paris High Level Forum, where development
ministers and senior officials will review progress on aid effectiveness, must agree to
measurable targets and annual donor-recipient meetings to provide a measure of
accountability.

1. Making aid work for poor people - why the Rome agenda matters
In Rome in 2003, official donors set out an agenda for making aid work better for its
supposed beneficiaries the worlds poor. Spurred on by the ambitious international
goal of halving poverty by 2015, donors belatedly recognised that the aid system is
failing to deliver on its own terms. Despite evidence that focused, good quality aid
does reduce poverty, too much aid continues to be driven by non-development
objectives. As a result, aid often ends up distorting recipient systems and
undermining capacity, while generating few benefits for poor people. In short, the aid
framework needed to catch up with the MDG framework, and focus on achieving a
clear set of development outcomes in poor countries. Donors meeting in Rome
responded to this challenge by announcing far-reaching changes to improve the
efficiency and accountability of aid, and start to tackle some of the well-documented
problems with the current aid system.

In particular, the Rome agenda acknowledged the urgent need for action on the
following key issues:

Red tape There are 35,000 aid transactions a year, 85% of them worth less than
$1m. Each comes bound in red tape, stemming from excessive donor demands for
accountability and micromanagement. Overstretched civil servants in aid dependent
countries are required to produce thousands of quarterly reports, and sit in hundreds
of meetings, with dozens of donor agencies, diverting scarce time and resources
from the day-to-day business of delivering government policy. Senegal alone had to
contend with over fifty World Bank missions in 2003, or one per week.
Round tripping donors tie about 40% of aid, and 20% of aid to Africa, to
purchases of goods and services from the donor country. Italy and the USA are
among the biggest culprits, spending upwards of 70% of their aid on their own
companies. This is the ultimate form of round tripping taking with one hand whats
given with the other, while advertising your generosity. More importantly, tying is
hugely wasteful, inflating procurement costs by up to $7bn a year money that could
be better spent reducing poverty.
Inappropriate blueprints aid is tied to a raft of highly controversial conditions,
requiring countries to pursue the donors policy preferences. For example, in Ghana
$100m of World Bank assistance was withheld because the government failed to
privatise municipal water. The UK followed suit, withholding 7m of its own aid, and
leaving two million urban Ghanaians waiting for clean water. Policies such as this
shut down policy space, undermine local ownership of development strategies,
bypass democratic accountability, and have a dismal track record of reducing
poverty.
Disbursement shortfalls there is a consistent gap between what donors promise,
and what they deliver. For Africa, actual disbursements fall short of projections by
14% for programme aid, and 26% for project aid. Aid also tends to arrive late, with
one quarter of aid arriving over 6 months late. These shortfalls disrupt and delay
implementation of national development strategies, thereby undermining progress
towards the MDGs.
Duplication and muddle aid is allocated in a scattergun approach, with some
countries and sectors getting the lions share (the donor darlings), and others getting
the scraps (the donor orphans). So whereas Nicaragua received $178 in aid per
person in 2001, Niger, at a similar income level, received just $22 per person. Donors
tend to be more concerned about the success and visibility of their project or
programme than the success of a countries development plan, and create their own
systems in parallel to the recipients. The upshot is that donor efforts are generally ill
coordinated, overlapping and often undermine local capacity.
Lack of transparency Donors do a poor job of disclosing information on their
conditions, their planned and actual disbursements, their procurement policies and
the impact of their activities. For example, in Zambia more than three quarters of
donor agencies fail to notify the government about their actual disbursements of aid.
There are no effective systems for gathering and publishing data on aid quality. Nor
are there forums, either at country level or internationally, to hold donors to account
for their performance, giving donor talk of partnership a hollow ring.

The impact of these problems on poor countries is twofold. The first impact is felt in
terms of a massive diversion of money, efforts and capacity from where its most
urgently needed, with recipient governments satisfying donor demands at the
expense of planning and delivering policy. The second impact is more insidious and
damaging, but less well recognised. Constant donor demands for upward
accountability, and the excessive use of parallel systems paralyse the public sector,
and undermine the quality of governance an irony given growing donor calls for
good governance. As the Millennium Project report by Jeff Sachs recently
highlighted, through both these channels donor malpractice is directly limiting the
ability of countries to progress towards the MDGs.

Action on these issues was given added urgency in the wake of pledges to reverse
declining aid at the UN summit in Monterrey in 2002. After a decade of increasing
meanness from the growing economies of the North, donors resolved to boost aid
flows and focus on poverty reduction. This agenda is welcome, and some tentative
progress has been made in delivering on these promises. However, at Rome donors
acknowledged that its impact will be limited unless it is accompanied by concerted
efforts to improve the efficiency and accountability of aid. In sum, what happens in
Paris will be the litmus test of donor commitment to ensuring aid puts poor peoples
needs front and centre.

2. Taking stock, or taking cover?


In early March, development ministers and senior officials will sit round the table in
Paris to take stock of progress over the past two years in delivering on this agenda,
and agree a set of indicators to follow their performance more closely. Their attention
will focus on four formal agenda items:

Ownership aid supports developing countries leadership of their own


development policy
Alignment aid is based on countries own development strategies and
systems
Harmonisation donors collective actions are efficient
Results aid is accountable and delivers clear outcomes

So far, progress has been glacially slow, with a yawning gap between what donors
have committed to and whats been delivered on the ground. The recent OCED-DAC
survey of 14 developing countries, where donor harmonisation and alignment efforts
have been concentrated, makes for grim reading. While theres some limited
evidence of improved communication between donors about how best to limit
duplication and overlap, both at the country level and internationally, even here much
of the discussion seems to be geared to how donors can reduce the cost to
themselves of doing business, rather than how they can support developing
countries own needs.

On the key points where substantive progress was called for in Rome, the survey
shows how little has been achieved. In particular, the following areas highlight the
lack of concerted action:

Ownership
- National Development Strategies - theres no evidence from World
Bank or other donor reviews of Poverty Reduction Strategies (PRSs)
that genuine country-led plans are being developed that are forcing
donors to adjust their aid response. Instead, PRSs still tend either to
be vague shopping lists, which any existing donor programme fits, or
else are retro-fitted with donor agencies own priorities as
happened with the inclusion of infrastructure as a priority in
Cambodias PRS at Japans insistence making ownership little more
than a polite donor fiction.
- Conditionality theres no evidence from recent donor evaluations of
a reduction in the aggregate burden of IMF and World Bank
conditions, and some evidence that donor harmonisation has led to
more donor money being put behind a largely unreformed set of
International Financial Institution conditions, while bilateral donors
seek to add their own conditions to IFI programmes. In short, donor
ownership of programmes appears to be actively undermining country
ownership. Harmonisation in the absence of reforms to conditionality
also has the potential to increase the negative impact of aid volatility,
as the IMF signal is switched on and off and carries with it a growing
share of a recipients aid.
Alignment
- Country systems Very limited progress has been made on aligning
with recipient planning, budget and reporting cycles, still less using
national systems. As a result, aid is administratively cumbersome and
ties up scarce recipient capacity. It also tends to be late and
unpredictable, which directly undermines planning for the international
development goals. In general, the DAC survey revealed a gulf
between donor and recipient perceptions of the extent to which
country systems are being used. This partly reflects the fact that many
country systems are identified, designed and implemented with donor
funds, in order to satisfy donor demands.
- Recipient demands - There are few signs that countries are placing
explicit demands on donors, or setting out policies on external finance
that might pressure donors to improve aid quality. India, where aid
totals less than 1% of GDP, and to a lesser extent Eritrea, Uganda
and Tanzania are exceptions. In some countries, this may be
attributable to a lack of recipient capacity or commitment. However,
its not always clear that donors would support a strong articulation of
recipient needs a point which may inhibit aid dependent countries
from challenging donors.
Harmonisation
- Transaction costs - No significant progress has been made in
reducing the recipient transaction costs that arise from the multiple
planning, accounting, monitoring and reporting procedures donors
bring with their money. Donors continue to make widespread use of
parallel systems such as Project Implementation Units that carry
heavy administrative and political costs for recipients, and there has
been little progress towards genuinely harmonised missions, silent
partnerships and other approaches that are likely to benefit recipients
substantially. For example, Vietnam hosted more than 400 donor
missions in 2003, from more than 20 agencies half of which each
have more than 40 active projects in the country.
- Tied Aid Efforts to untie aid have been desultory at best overall
some 40% of official bilateral aid remains tied to goods and services
from the donor country while food aid and technical assistance both
continue to be excluded from definitions of untying. Yet tied technical
assistance in particular has an abysmal track record of responding to
recipient needs, or of providing value for money.
Results
- Transparency and accountability - Accountability remains a one-
way street, with donors failing to publish adequate information on aid
flows, or progress on the aid effectiveness principles adopted at
Rome. Without transparency, mutual accountability is impossible yet
several key donors including Japan and the US are objecting to the
establishment of measurable progress indicators in Paris.
- Evaluation - Donors have made sluggish progress towards using
countries own systems to gauge their impact, or even towards
harmonising their need for evaluation into a single, periodic report.
Instead, multiple parallel evaluation systems continue to put huge
strain on aid recipients, while neglecting to feed back into country
systems.

The failure to act decisively on the commitments made in Rome is clear to all the
participants in the process. Whats less clear is how donors will now respond. The
DAC members meeting in Paris face a straightforward choice: they can take stock,
identify the reasons for inaction, and chart a way forward that delivers real progress
for the worlds poor. Alternatively, they can take cover, and hide behind the same
tired excuses and mutual finger pointing that have characterised previous donor
forums on the issue.

3. Three key actions to deliver pro-poor aid


For their part, developing countries cannot afford further donor prevarication. Five
years on from the Millennium Summit, its increasingly apparent that progress
towards the MDGs demands a gear change in aid quality, as well as aid volumes.
Without predictable aid that supports recipient capacity, governments cannot take the
necessary long term steps to achieve the MDGs. ActionAid and Oxfam are calling on
the donors who are meeting in Paris to rise to the challenge, and act on the following
key recommendations to provide aid that genuinely supports poverty reduction:

II. Make aid accountable


So far, the aid effectiveness debate has existed in a political vacuum, far removed
from the public accountability for results that has pushed donors to deliver debt relief,
and increase aid volumes. This has to change. The Rome agenda cannot make
meaningful progress as a series of gentlemens agreements hatched in closed-door
donor meetings. Recent efforts to open up the process, by including the SPA group
of developing countries in limited discussions, and by inviting civil society to open a
dialogue, are a nod in the right direction, but do not go far enough. Instead, there
must be agreement on an open process where all partners make explicit
commitments, are monitored and held publicly accountable for what they do and
dont deliver. In particular:
Adopt monitorable and ambitious targets: Donors need to make a
clear-cut commitment to principles of transparency. At Paris, they must
agree a set of monitorable and ambitious targets that capture key issues
of aid efficiency, accountability and ownership. These need to go beyond
the current proposals in the draft declaration.
Convene annual multi-stakeholder reviews: There should be an annual
publication and review of progress, donor by donor as well as by recipient,
towards these targets. This needs to happen in an international forum that
brings together donors, recipients and civil society in a spirit of mutual
accountability. This forum should be jointly convened by the DAC, but
cannot be controlled by the DAC members if developing country voices
are going to be given equal footing.
Establish an Independent Commission: An ombudsman should be
created to provide impartial oversight of progress by both donors and
recipients towards their commitments. This post could report directly to
the UN Secretary General as part of an Independent Commission on Aid
Effectiveness.
Create country level forums: At the country level, forums are needed to
hold donors and recipients jointly to account for delivery. Consultative
Group meetings could be developed to serve this function, with civil
society involvement.
Provide technical support: Donors should pool funding to support
neutral capacity strengthening activities that encourage recipients to
establish clear policies on external finance, and be more selective about
accepting donor funds.

III. Make aid effective


The most challenging aid reform issues that were identified at Rome have
subsequently been sidelined or ignored by the majority of donors. Soft issues that
do not challenge the objectives and incentives of aid agencies have instead been
pushed to the fore, with an emphasis on information sharing and technical assistance
for recipients. These have been justified by arguments that developing countries lack
of commitment and capacity are the principal block to progress. The key issues of
harmonisation and alignment need to be placed back on the agenda as urgent
priorities, with a clear plan of action concluded at the High Level Forum. In particular:
Untie all aid: Donors need to agree clear targets for untying all aid, and stick
to them. The current declaration is woefully inadequate, stating only that
donors will maintain efforts, which have so far been minimal. Untying needs
to extend to Technical Assistance and food aid, which together account for
over one third of all aid, and which currently have a highly distorting effect on
recipient policies and economies.
Reform Technical Assistance: Clear targets should be adopted for pooling
technical assistance, and making it truly technical rather than another
influencing tool used by donors to promote their policy priorities, and support
their own consultancy industries. Experience of pooled, untied TA is limited,
but countries such as South Africa have demonstrated its positive impact.
Build local procurement: Procurement should be carried out through
recipient government systems, and used to build up local private sector
capacity and expertise. Where transparent, competitive procurement
systems dont exist, donors should actively support their development.
Donors should undertake to be fully transparent with their own procurement
procedures, in line with their policy lines on good governance and corruption.
Align with budgets: Donors must move decisively to align with recipient
budget cycles, and wherever possible, provide aid through countries budget
systems in multi-year commitments. This is critical to reducing recipient
transaction costs, managing the recurrent cost implications of scaling up
basic services, and to improving the timeliness and predictability of donor
aid, all of which are essential if countries are going to plan ahead for
achieving the MDGs.
Restrict and focus conditions: Intrusive policy conditions should be
abandoned. Donors should commit to full disclosure of all remaining
conditions, and establish transparent processes for agreeing them.

IV. Reform the aid architecture


Progress on many of these aid alignment and harmonisation challenges will require
significant changes in how bilateral donors use IMF and World Bank conditions as a
signal, and in how they piggy back on IFI systems and analysis. More broadly, the
Rome agenda is soon likely to reach the limits of what it can realistically achieve in
the absence of wider reforms to the aid architecture.

Architecture can seem a misnomer for a construction as ramshackle as the current


aid system. A slew of competing objectives and incentives mean that most aid is not
spent on poor people, or in the poorest countries, and rarely responds in a
straightforward manner to recipient demands. The past half-century has witnessed
the proliferation of official donors, out of all proportion to any increases in aid,
creating an increasingly confused situation where the costs of coordination have
steadily grown as the benefits to any single agency have diminished. The accession
of ten new member states to the EU, each of them required by the European
Commission to establish their own aid agency as a condition of membership, has
significantly added to this problem. So far, donors have been keen to keep these
systemic issues off the agenda for Paris, and talked about aid effectiveness as if it is
disembodied, and can be tackled separately from underlying objectives, incentives
and institutions. Instead, they need to kick-start a structured discussion, with
recipients and civil society, about how best to reform the aid architecture. In
particular, the following issues demand attention:
Focus on poverty: Allocation of aid across countries and sectors needs to
be made more even, and follow need and ability to use resources, rather
than other, non-development objectives. One option for achieving this could
be to agree a limit on the number of donor agencies active in each low
income country, while developing topping up funding mechanisms for donor
orphans as has started to happen with the Education Fast Track Initiative.
Cut transaction costs: Transaction costs are especially high in a limited
number of sectors in aid dependent low-income countries, where multiple
donors are actively engaged in policy dialogue. Donors should move to
develop more silent partnerships, where funding is provided through another
agency, and move other coordination costs upstream by identifying a single
interlocutor with government.
Identify structural reforms: The growing number of official bilateral and
multilateral donors underlies many of the aid effectiveness problems
identified in this paper. A serious discussion needs to come out of the Paris
forum about streamlining of the existing aid system. This cannot be achieved
simply by expecting aid recipients to be more selective about the sources
from which they take aid. As the current IDA replenishment concludes, and
the future shape of EU development finance is discussed, deliberate
decisions need to be taken about the respective roles of multilateral and
bilateral aid agencies, and the functions of the UN system.

4. Conclusions
Aid has a critical role to play in achieving the Millennium Development Goals.
However, this aid has to be effective to make a real difference to the lives of poor
people. Effective aid demands much more concerted donor efforts to cut red tape,
reduce and focus conditions, untie, work within country systems, and make aid
predictable and results-focused. These are major challenges to the aid system, since
they imply a redistribution of power between recipients and donors, and far greater
openness and accountability than currently exists. They cannot be met without high-
level political commitment and engagement, and the full integration of the Rome
agenda into wider plans for achieving poverty reduction.

When donors meet in Paris, they will have the opportunity to agree a set of targets,
and accountability mechanisms that increase the pressure on them to act, and take
clear steps towards efficient and accountable aid. Poor quality aid is neither in the
interests of the recipients, nor the donors. As the public response around the world to
the Indian Ocean Tsunami shows, rich country publics do care, and do think aid can
make a difference. However, they also expect aid principally to benefit poor people,
and to support the long-term capacity of countries to plot their own development
path. At the moment, aid is failing to do this. At the DAC High Level Forum, ministers
and officials must grasp the nettle of reform, and set in place an aid system that
marks 2005 as a decisive year in the fight to end poverty.

This briefing was written by Patrick Watt at ActionAid International UK. Arry Fraser
and Max Lawson at Oxfam GB, and Louise Hilditch at ActionAid Brussels office also
contributed.

ActionAid International is a unique partnership of


people who are fighting for a better world - a world
without poverty.

Oxfam International is a confederation of twelve


organisations working together in more than 100
countries to find lasting solutions to poverty and
injustice: Oxfam America, Oxfam-in-Belgium, Oxfam
Canada, Oxfam Community Aid Abroad (Australia),
Oxfam Germany, Oxfam Great Britain, Oxfam Hong
Kong, Intermn Oxfam (Spain), Oxfam Ireland, Novib
Oxfam Netherlands, Oxfam New Zealand, and Oxfam
Quebec.

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